Over Lily’s shoulder, Miranda counted — four places, four people — Lily made one, Miranda made two, for number three there was Jennifer, Lily’s mother, and the fourth was her GrandAnna, her white hair gleaming. Jennifer and GrandAnna sat side by side with their elbows on the table. They leaned forward, anticipating a meal. They were naked except for corsets laced so tightly that their dessicated bodies dipped in and out like parchment scrolls bound around the middle. They stared at Miranda in numb agony. Padlocks were placed over their parted mouths, boring through the top lip and closing at the bottom. Miranda could see their tongues writhing.
“Who did this to them?” Miranda asked Lily, curling her arms around her mother’s neck.
Lily turned her head away. “I did,” she said. She sounded proud.
The long table was made of pearl, or very clean bone, and it was crowded with plates and dishes; there was fruit, and jugs of the spiced wine her father would make in a cauldron at the beginning of November. There were jugs of the pithy lemonade that her father made in the very same cauldron when May came. Miranda knew exactly what was on the table because she and Lily joined hands and walked up and down its length, looking for something, anything, that Miranda might like to eat. Food steamed and sizzled and swam in juices and sauces hot and cold and rich and sweet, there were even sticks of chalk and strips of plastic, but all they did was make Miranda hungrier for what was not there, so hungry that she released her mother’s hand and held her own throat and gagged. Her hunger hardened her stomach, grew new teeth inside her.
“Miranda you must eat something,” Lily said, sorrowfully. “What will you eat? Tell me and I’ll bring it to you.”
Miranda shook her head. She didn’t know. No, that was wrong. She knew, but she couldn’t say it.
Lily sat down at the table, opposite Jennifer and GrandAnna. Lily played with a padlock. She looked angelic, too pure to be plainly seen. Her combat trousers and vest top were badly crumpled, the way they usually got when she took night flights and spent the hours squirming in her plane seat. Her hair was a little longer.
Miranda began to speak, but Lily raised a finger to her lips — there was a fifth in the room, someone listening. Miranda looked very carefully at each thing in the room, waiting for the fifth person to appear. She looked under the table — maybe the fifth person was there. They were not. As she straightened up, she met her GrandAnna’s gaze. Her GrandAnna’s eyes spoke to her; they said, Eat for me.
“Eat for us,” Jennifer slurred through her padlock.
Another bomb struck, with such force that Miranda fell. She lifted herself up on her hands and crawled into the corner, feeling as if she’d broken her shoulder on the floor. None of the others had even moved. They were used to this.
“Will there be another one after this?” Miranda asked. No one answered her. “Oh my God,” she said. She was shaking already, in anticipation of the next drop. “Please don’t let there be any more.”
“There’s a war on,” GrandAnna said, slowly, clearly, and with great severity.
“It’s safe in here,” Lily added. “Us Silver girls together.” She sounded sarcastic, but looked sincere.
Miranda’s fall had been cushioned by clothes. The clothes were familiar: jeans, a short-sleeved T-shirt, a hooded jacket, and a pair of trainers. The fifth person. Oh, she knew where he was; he was there, right beside her head. There were holes bored into the wall. She knew that they numbered ten when a finger inched out of each hole with a sluggishness that fascinated her. The way the fingers twitched, she got a sense that they weren’t attached to a body, only to each other, and that she was watching ruptured nerve endings in denial. The hands were brown. Jalil’s party trick hands, the hands he could turn in a full circle without putting stress on his wrist bone
(he should have kept away from her)
oh no oh no oh oh no oh
Miranda knew that she had done this, in a period of inattention. It was not unlike watching someone else take her hand and guide it and the pen it held into putting down a perfect copy of her signature.
More, Jennifer and GrandAnna said, but Lily came and ran a pitying hand over Miranda’s hair and her face as she cowered in the corner, blood sticking her clothes to her body. Lily understood, she understood everything. Lily gave Miranda a padlock. Miranda gratefully kissed its cold loop. Jennifer and GrandAnna moaned and beat the table, pushing dishes and jugs off its edges as Miranda climbed back up into the main house. Miranda passed the hallway mirror and she was clean again. She looked at her reflection and saw a cube instead, four stiff faces in one. She went outside and climbed back into the hammock. The sun rose and that made it morning.
Her father was in the deck chair beside the hammock, his notebook on his lap. He’d fallen asleep with his glasses on. He looked happy in his sleep. Miranda ran her tongue around the inside of her mouth—what can I taste, what can I taste, what can I Luc’s head drooped and, in raising it with a guilty jerk, he woke himself up. He smiled at her.
Miranda was on the point of saying that she might need to go away again. Only she wasn’t sure what good it would do. Hadn’t it begun while she was away?
“You should have made me get out of the hammock,” Miranda said.
Luc shook his head. “You looked far too peaceful for me to interrupt.”
Miranda laughed emptily. She asked, “What are you writing?”
Luc took his glasses off and closed them back into their case. “A recipe book, I hope. Based around seasonality. Every other word seems to be ‘Lily’, or ‘my wife,’ or ‘the twins’ maman.’ ”
“Father,” Miranda said. She could only lie there and look at him.
“What if we sold the house?” Luc said. “What if I went back to food writing and we went back to London?”
Miranda held her hand out to him, even though she had no chance of touching him from where she was.
“I don’t mind. I’m sure Eliot is the same. We’ll do whatever you like,” she told him, not really believing that they would be allowed to leave. They had never lived in London, they had always lived in her GrandAnna’s house.
“Miranda,” Luc said. “You look… so different, since… I don’t think you understand how different you look.”
“I cut my hair and lost some weight — which I’ll put back on, really I will — that’s all.”
Luc put his glasses on again and looked her over. He shook his head.
“Something misgives me.”
Miranda said nothing. What was there to say?
“What’s your date of birth, daughter of mine?”
“Father.”
“Well?”
“November 12th,” she said, and laughed. Her father did too.
“And the year?” he asked.
And the year, and the year, and the year. There was no answer anywhere. She tried not to panic. Four numbers came to her, but they were upside down and she couldn’t read them. She tried to count back from the year 2000. To do that successfully she would need to know how old she was, and she didn’t know. Rather than make a wrong guess, she said, “Father,” as scornfully as she could manage. He smiled.